Pygmalion
Texts needed :
Keating, Helen Levine. Lives Through Literature: A Thematic Anthology.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. (Text for Pygmalion).
Questions to be explored:
What is the value in education?
What is the difference between education, intelligence, and knowledge?
What is Shaw saying about education?
What is Shaw saying about society?
Can great art be anything else?
Must a person present themselves well in order to be understood?
Must a person present themselves well in order to be respected?
Why is respect important?
Is Shaw making a statement about women and education?
What is the value in small talk?
How do you classify your personal identity?
Quotes for consideration:
Pickering states, “You must understand what you’re doing.”
Higgins responds, “Do any of us know what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?”
“The only living life is in the past and future...the present is an interlude...
a strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness we are living.”
- Eugene O’Neill, Strange Interlude (1928) pt. 2, act 8
“As for the world portrayed here, the world from which slices are cut in order to produce these moods and movements of the emotions, its appearance is such, produced from such slight and wretched stuff as a few pieces of cardboard, a little miming, a bit of text, that one has to admire the theatre folk who, with so feeble a reflection of the real world, can move the feelings of their audience so much more strongly than does the world itself.”
- Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre (1948)
“Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.”
- Mark Twain
About Pygmalion Excerpted from Gale
Pygmalion is a comedy about a phonetics expert who, as a kind of social experiment, attempts to make a lady out of an uneducated Cockney flower-girl. Although not as intellectually complex as some of the other plays in Shaw's "theatre of ideas," Pygmalion nevertheless probes important questions about social class, human behavior, and relations between the sexes.
Hoping to circumvent what he felt was the tendency of the London press to criticize his plays unfairly, Shaw chose to produce a German translation of Pygmalion in Vienna and Berlin before bringing the play to London. The London critics appreciated the acclaim the play had received overseas, and, after it opened at His Majesty's Theatre on April 11, 1914, it enjoyed success, firmly establishing Shaw's reputation as a popular playwright.
Accompanying his subterfuge with the London press, Shaw also plotted to trick his audience out of any prejudicial views they held about the play's content. This he did by assuming their familiarity with the myth of Pygmalion, from the Greek playwright Ovid's Metamorphoses, encouraging them to think that Pygmalion was a classical play. He furthered the ruse by directing the play anonymously and casting a leading actress who had never before appeared in a working-class role. In Ovid's tale, Pygmalion is a man disgusted with real-life women who chooses celibacy and the pursuit of an ideal woman, whom he carves out of ivory. Wishing the statue were real, he makes a sacrifice to Venus, the goddess of love, who brings the statue to life. By the late Renaissance, poets and dramatists began to contemplate the thoughts and feelings of this woman, who woke full-grown in the arms of a lover. Shaw's central character—the flower girl Liza Doolittle—expresses articulately how her transformation has made her feel, and he adds the additional twist that Liza turns on her "creator" in the end by leaving him.
In addition to the importance of the original Pygmalion myth to Shaw's play, critics have pointed out the possible influence of other works, such as Tobias Smollett's novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (which similarly involves a gentleman attempting to make a fine lady out of a "coarse" working girl), and a number of plays, including W.S. Gilbert's Pygmalion and Galatea and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House. Shaw denied borrowing the story directly from any of these sources, but there are traces of them in his play, as there are of the well-known story of Cinderella, and shades of the famous stories of other somewhat vain "creators" whose experiments have unforeseen implications: Faust, Dr. Frankenstein, Svengali.
Essay paper
Choose from the following topics:
Explore the theme of education and explain how Shaw was making a comment on social class (either positive or negative).
Explore the theme of education and explain an effect it has on a character or characters.
Create your own topic on the theme of education (your thesis must be approved by me).
Requirements:
Three outside sources.
Paper must be 5-7 pages.
Extra Credit:
See The King’s Speech [R] (2010)
Write a typed 2-3 page essay on either a particular scene, character, location, etc and compare it to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. No outside sources required.